La Decima Vittima (The 10th Victim)

State Of Andress

La Decima Vittima 
(The 10th Victim)
1965 Italy
Directed by Elio Petri
Shameless 
DVD Region 0/BluRay Region B

Warning: Slight spoilers because some 
of the scenes are just so damned fun!

It was about thirteen years ago that I first became properly aware of The 10th Victim. I know this because it was the same year that one of my best friends moved away from his ancestral home and had a house warming party. A listing in the National Film Theatre for the movie caught my eye. I realised that this would be on the afternoon, at the same time, as my friend’s party.

Now, how can I put this? Social gatherings really aren’t my thing. If I am absolutely forced to attend one of these wretched events I’ll hug a single, solitary drink, stand against a wall and attempt to understand what kind of small talk I should attempt to engage in should anyone actually bother to come and talk to me... which always proves a great waste of my speculative brain power because, after about two to three minutes, nobody ever does come and talk to me.

So, since my friends knew me and I figured they’d much rather be deprived of my less than sparkling company under such a set of circumstances, I decided to go along to Screen One of the NFT instead, just to see if the glossy, confection of a film they were purporting to be showing in any way lived up to the promise of its title and promotional paragraph.

The Tenth Victim is a science fiction film produced by Carlo Ponti and based on legendary sci-fi writer Robert Sheckley’s short story The Seventh Victim (he also wrote the novelisation of the movie version and a few sequel novels). The film is set in a world of the near future, where wars and the psychological tendencies in people that lead to them are averted by a national game where you can sign up to be, alternatively, hunter and hunted throughout your daily routine, to kill or be killed for prize money. If you make it through ten hunts, you become an international hero and win a massive money prize and all kinds of benefits. If you fail to survive ten hunts, as most people do, well... you know... you just end up dead.

The film starts with Ursula Andress playing her ninth hunt as a “hunted”, as she playfully dodges bullets and lures her hunter into a club, The Masoch Club. Piero Piccioni’s amazing and infectious score, with vocal noodlings by the singer Mina, starts right away and, though there are a lot of other melodies throughout the movie, this one keeps going through many repeat variations and plays on your subconscious at key moments. Ursula, playing American Caroline Meredith, disguisess herself as a dancer and takes out her hunter with one of several elements of this film which were used decades later in Austin Powers, International Man Of Mystery. That is to say... she blasts the hell out of her hunter with her bikini guns.

We then scoot to Italy to meet her victim, who will be her tenth, if she can kill him. This is  Marcello Mastroianni playing, um, Marcello Poletti. We are first introduced to him when his victim in the hunt is demanding his riding boots to be brought to him at a horse show. Knowing the German’s vanity, Marcello has wired the heels of his boots to explode so, when the German looks at himself in a full length mirror and clicks his heels together... BOOM!

It’s all quite delightful and the film then becomes a romp as Ursula stalks her victim to learn more of him (the rules are such that the person hunting knows everything about the victim but the hunted has to work out who is after him/her) and starts finding this poor man, who has just had his marriage annulled and doesn’t want to marry his latest lover, an interesting candidate... perhaps even for romance. However, romance comes second to becoming a “decathlete” and the film becomes a fun game of cat and mouse as Caroline attempts to lure Marcello to The Temple Of Venus in Rome in order to kill him live on television for some high paying sponsors... the makers of the popular beverage Ming Tea (and there’s another element that made it into Austin Powers, which the hero of that later film takes as the name of his pop group).

The film is spectacular. The shot compositions are very clean and show a future which is a far cry from the dust and grime of such science fiction classics as Blade Runner (reviewed here). The colours are amazing... being shot at that time when Italian films were noted for using lighting effects such as purples pitched against greens and bright yellows. It’s a truly beautiful film to look at and the mise en scene is very much like those found in the better gialli which would start to catch on before the end of the decade.

There’s also a certain sense of surrealism found within the parameters of the film as the budgets would not allow for full fledged futuristic sets. Instead, we have short cuts and metaphors which gel with the science fiction setting and these, as much as anything, truly make the film a time piece. There’s no way a premise like this would be tackled in this way now but the times then were playful enough that when one character says they survived their death because they were wearing a bullet proof skin of their own design, they can just about get away with it. It’s all very sixties... and all very entertaining. And downright stunning, as it happens.

And that score. Absolutely fantastic. A disc to take away on a desert island, for sure.

The first two things I did when I got out of the screening all those years ago were a) track down and purchase the old soundtrack album and b) add the old Anchor Bay US Region 1 DVD of this to my Christmas list pronto. I love that old Anchor Bay DVD but, it has to be said, with the film’s inaugural release in the UK from Shameless, in a dual format edition comprising both DVD and Blu Ray, the film shines now like it never has before. The transfer is absolutely stunning and the image crisp, clear and something which I suspect will get a lot of plays and, possibly, a lot of lends over the years.

Such a stunning movie and still an instant recommendation from me for anyone who is into Italian film and just drop dead gorgeous cinema in general. If you like movies, you owe it to yourself to give The 10th Victim a spin or two.

Dr. No

Toppleganger

Dr. No
1962 UK
Directed by Terence Young
EON Blu Ray Region A/B/C

Right. I apologise in advance if, in the next few months, you see a load of Bond reviews on this site. Normal service will be continued as soon as possible but, you see, I got given the 50th Anniversary Bond Box on blu-ray as a Christmas present... so this may take me a while to get through.

I’ve been a casual and sometimes not-so-casual observer of the James Bond character since I was five years old and saw Live And Let Die, followed by the majority of the Connery films, in the cinema around 1973/74. For further information about my relationship with the Bond movies, see my Skyfall review here. 

I’ve seen most of the Bond films at the actual cinema, with the exception of two... A View To A Kill is something I passed on (having gotten so fed up with what the Bond films had turned into by the time they got to Octopussy) and this one, Dr. No. My first viewing of Dr. No came when I was about 6 years old and we went around to my uncles house to watch it on television because, unlike us, his television set was a “colour” set. This was one of two such trips I remember that year going to see a movie on his colour TV, the other being Hammer’s Taste The Blood Of Dracula... which has a sure influence on th mind of this six year old.

Dr. No is one of those films which, from our perspective now, can be seen as being a “not-quite-Bond-film”. That is to say, it’s half in the sixties, carrying an edge to it which was a little unusual for the time, but at the same time is immensely “fifties glamorous and charming”... you can easily see why Cary Grant was originally considered for the role. Many people say that the full-on Bond style didn’t completely emerge until Goldfinger and, while I concur that the “Bond vehicle” which isn’t always a highlight in the series, and the “vocal backed” title sequence weren’t there until Goldfinger... I would humbly disagree with all the “experts” out there and say that From Russia With Love is really the one that defined and polished the formula which came to be instantly recognisable as “the Bond formula”. However, I’ll leave that elaboration for the From Russia With Love review I’ll need to do soonest.

When you look at Dr. No now, and place it in the context of the time of the films original release, it’s very easy to see why this was such a hit. It may, indeed, look a little rooted in the fifties now but from the vantage point of an audience back then the similarities to other films around them would probably not have been that apparent and it must have seemed so different to anything else on offer at their local fleapit cinemas. This film had a very hard edge to it which is one thing, and then it wraps it all up with bright colours (almost Bava-esque when Connery and Bond-girl Ursula Andress step out of decontamination near the end), clean shot set ups and a pop-culture casualness which would have been an amazingly seductive cocktail for anyone back in 1962... and let’s face it, it still is today.

The influence of Bond was huge and one of the things which it changed for a while was in the editing. Future On Her Majesty’s Secret Service director Peter Hunt edited the first five movies and he did so in a style which must have shocked a lot of his fellow professionals at the time. Bond dared to break one of the unbreakable rules of editing, you see... “Thou Shalt Not Cut A Shot On Movement”. Yep, this one does this all over the place... it doesn’t wait for the camera to stop moving before cutting away if it doesn’t want to and Hunt was smart in this respect... he knew this would ramp up the action shots to an unbelievable degree and, although the sound hits weren’t up to their abstract best on this movie (that would cement in From Russia With Love), the editing was enough to give the audience of the time an absolutely amazing juxtaposition of potential to kinetic energy in the action, whizzed along at 24 frames per second on to their retinas.

I’m not knocking the sound design on this movie though. Oh no. It’s brilliant. The familiar gun barrel opening starts up with weird trills and hums which I don’t think were kept for any of the other movies in the series... but instead of going into the traditional pre-credits sequence, it goes straight into the titles, designed so smartly (with the aid of little sticky, coloured dots bought from Woolworths... no CGI then, folks) by Maurice Binder. The sound throughout the movie continues to be fantastic. There’s a sequence where Bond is trying to escape through a bizarre (and in the book, deliberately deadly) ventilation system and the sounds you hear on the soundtrack during this sequence are amazing.

I say the ventilation system was in the book... it was in a much different form and it would be true to say that Dr. No is not the most accurate in terms of adaptation of the source novel (but closer than many of the movies that followed it over the decades). The original novel, Casino Royale, was already a TV play in the fifties and that version was decidedly closer to that book than any of the versions of it that came after. Dr. No was an unusual book to start the franchise off on because it comes somewhere near halfway through the run of books.

Indeed, the events of the previous novel, From Russia With Love, produce an interesting cinematic anomaly in the series as this became the second movie. Bond dies in the original novel From Russia With Love, you see. Killed by a deadly, poisoned kick from Rosa Klebb’s knife-shoe thingamajig. It was, if my memory is serving me as I would hope, only due to the influence of Philip Marlow writer Raymond Chandler, who persuaded Ian Fleming to carry on writing the character, that the Bond character was taken up by Fleming again and resurrected at the beginning of Dr. No... where he is rushed to a hospital at the start of the book and cured of the poison which flooded his system and “done him in” in the previous novel. All very interesting but, considering that From Russia With Love became the second movie, it’s interesting that there is a reference in the movie version of Dr. No about those events in From Russia With Love. When Bond is being given his Walther PPK in M’s office by Major Boothroyd (who is Q, but not yet played by Desmond Llewellyn, who made the role famous), where Bond’s is reminded that his Beretta jammed on him and he ended up spending six months in hospital as a result... those six months were the time it took to recover from Rosa Klebb’s neatly timed kick after his gun jammed. So it’s an interesting little thing to note in the movie and it’s one of many unusual anomalies thrown up in the Bond series.

There are other major changes from the source novel... such as the book being about the plot revolving around guana (droppings) for their rich soil enhancing properties and being replaced with something more palatable to cinema audiences... the “toppling” of American rockets. But there’s also another little “long term” jam the producers got themselves into because of the sequence in which they chose to film the series, and this time it was because they did follow the events of the book...

The character of Quarrel, the guide who takes Bond to Crab Quay, was already a recurring character in the book, having played a big part in an earlier book, Live And Let Die. Dr. No is Bond’s second encounter with the character and in both the book and the film versions he is burnt to death by the bad guys. However... this obviously left the filmmakers with a slight (it’s a question of taste and respect) problem when it came time to shoot Live And Let Die a decade later. How did they solve that little problem? Well, wait until I review Live And Let Die and I’ll tell you.

Felix Leiter is another big change... missing an arm and half a leg from the second book on, due to a nasty encounter with some sharks in the novel Live And Let Die (this particular encounter finally turned up on film as part of the movie License To Kill), here he has miraculously got all his limbs, and doesn’t wear a fake leg and hook in place of his gun hand either. Felix has never been done quite right on film, I believe.

What else is there to say about this movie then, without giving too much of the action away? All of the performances are solid with series regulars Sean Connery (personally groomed for the role by the director to lose the rough diamond quality... although I think it would be fair to say that the Bond character has always been a bit of a government hired thug), Bernard Lee, Lois Maxwell and Eunice Gayson (who only stayed for the first two films), are all great and it also has the “iconic” turn from a dubbed out Ursula Andress, which epitomised the Bond films in the sixties and for years to come.

Then there’s the music, which is by Monty Norman... and it really is by Monty Norman people. I love John Barry as much as the next person and his arrangement of the Bond theme (featuring Vic Flick on guitar) is one of the most powerful and recognisable pieces of music in film history. But the basic melody is Norman’s and I’m sick of people saying it isn’t... so let’s look at the facts.

Norman had finished his score. It was done. Barry was brought on to do a theme tune and he arranged Norman’s melody line from his opera A House For Mr. Biswas. How can I be so sure that it was Norman’s melody line which was taken? Well just listen to the film... the Bond theme is all over it... admittedly because the sound guys kept slotting in Barry’s excellent arrangement of it all over the movie when it was needed... but this isn’t the only occurrence of “the Bond theme” in the movie, there are several instances where Norman has also used his theme throughout the soundtrack and, like I said, he’d already done his bits. There was even a cue where Norman utilised his own theme in this movie which was tracked into Barry’s score for From Russia With Love (when the helicopter crashes, if memory serves) and so I really am sick of people levelling accusations of “Norman didn’t write it” at the composer. Seriously, John Barry is easily one of the greatest composers (and arrangers, for that matter) in English music... but he didn’t write the Bond theme... just added to it.

And that’s about all I’ve got to say about this particular movie, methinks. It’s a real blast and has a certain 1950s charm to it while still having the hard edge (and the hard edge of old school male chauvinism which is also a defining part of Bond’s basic character... although I don’t believe the character is particularly misogynistic, as some people believe) and sense of danger to it. It was also a huge influence on almost every technical aspect you can think of... and I haven’t mentioned Ken Adams’ amazing sets for these movies but, seriously, they are works of great cinematic art in the series (especially the simple room with just a chair, a grate and a shadow... you’ll know it when you see it but I also put a picture at the top of this page). If you’ve not seen a Bond movie before then this first one in the regular EON series is definitely worth more than a casual glance... it’s quite groundbreaking in many ways and certainly a lot of fun. Ignore it at your peril.

EON James Bond Movie Reviews on NUTS4R2

Dr. No

From Russia With Love

Goldfinger

Thunderball

You Only Live Twice  

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

Diamonds Are Forever

Live And Let Die

The Man With The Golden Gun  

The Spy Who Loved Me

Moonraker

For Your Eyes Only

Octopussy

A View To A Kill 

The LIving Daylights 

Licence To Kill  

GoldenEye

Tomorrow Never Dies

The World Is Not Enough  

Die Another Day 

Casino Royale

Quantum Of Solace

Skyfall
S.P.E.C.T.R.E

Red Sun (Soleil Rouge)

Bron-shido!


Red Sun (Soleil Rouge) 
France/Italy/Spain 1971
Directed by Terence young
Optimum Region 2

I’ve been trying to obtain a watchable home video edition of Red Sun for many years now. Usually the prints available of this one are presented in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio but we’ve finally now got a release which restores the original theatrical 1.85:1 ratio (even though I suspect, having now seen it in this aspect ratio, that it was originally shot in 1.33:1 and cropped down for cinemas).

This is good because, Red Sun is a bit of a curio as a Western, in that it stars my favourite actor Toshiro Mifune, rubbing shoulders with an all star cast which includes Charles Bronson, Alain Delon, Ursula Andress and Capucine.

I’ll say that lot again while elaborating further so it can sink in why this movie screams out to be watched by anyone who loves cinema...

It stars Toshiro Mifune as a yojimbo who finds himself in the Wild West, aided (unwillingly at first) by the roguish outlaw Charles Bronson as they seek the current possessor of a precious sword and the loot which Bronson’s gang had stolen from the train carrying Mifune and his diplomat/retainer. The villain who has run off with all this is Bronson’s double crossing, evil and deadly former gang member as played by Alain Delon. On the way they stop by in Capucine’s whorehouse to pick up Delon’s girlfriend Christina, as played by Ursula Andress, to use as a bargaining chip. And the whole thing is directed by James Bond director Terence young, who also taps one of his regular character actors Anthony Dawson in a small role (well it would have to be a small role sharing screen time with this cast, wouldn’t it?).

Despite the pitfalls of the enormity of these stars coming together in this movie, and the politics of three countries co-financing the venture, Red Sun actually turns out to be, not just an interesting movie, but an entertaining one. It’s a little inconsistent in places but ultimately it’s held together by the strength of the actors (who really are, in this case, very much “movie stars”) and you really can’t fault the performances here (this is possibly the best I’ve seen Ursula Andress do in a movie, if not the most I’ve seen of her in a film... although she does briefly go topless for one scene).

The film seems, maybe, just a little too comfortable to watch in places although I don’t know why that is because in terms of content, Terence young doesn’t steer clear of nudity and he certainly doesn’t skimp on the blood, usually evident when Mifune runs someone through with his sword. But I did have some issues with some of the footage and the way it’s been cut together in general. There are a lot of Western landscapes with the small figures of our main protagonists (usually it’s Mifune and Bronson together in these kinds of shots) in contrast to the environment which threatens to engulf them and this visual style seems to work really well in some places, nicely framed with a sense of scale implied within the confines of the shot... and then there are other shots of a similar content which just look sloppy and badly framed like they’re missing a major element which could have made them work. Unfortunately, the two kinds of shots are cut next to each other as often or not which gives the viewer a sense of unease... it’s like some of the shots were taken by the main crew and other shots were taken by the second unit, who were perhaps a little less on the ball when it came to selecting a similar style of shot design. It does tend to lend some sequences in the film a certain lack of consistency which I found wore on my nerves after a while.

This movie is a bit of a Western road movie so there are a lot of shots which are one or two (occasionally more) riders on the trail of their ultimate treasure but it’s the characterisations when the camera moves in a tad tighter that make this movie so darned entertaining. Toshiro Mifune’s “honourable warrior” who has seven knots tied in his sash and who has to undo one knot each day, moving him further forward to the point where, if he fails to recover the sword after seven days have passed, he must commit seppuku and join his ancestors... is a typical Mifune characterisation. That is to say it’s damn good and you can just feel the loss of history in the character when he reveals that, due to the political climate in his own country as forced by people like the Americans, he is probably of the last generation of samurai before they are no longer needed and die out as a breed.

Charles Bronson’s relationship to Mifune in the film is not dissimilar to the relationship dynamic which plays out between Mifune and Lee Marvin in John Boorman’s Hell In The Pacific. Bronson always trying to lose Mifune or get the drop on him and Mifune repaying in kind... and sure enough the two soon become thicker with each other and form a genuine friendship, a friendship which ultimately leads Bronson to throw away his dreams of finding the gold and instead, at the last knockings, embracing the strength of character to sacrifice his goals and instead, do the honourable thing.

Alain Delon is just bad and you can’t trust him from the start. You know he’s bad because he’s incredibly well dressed and wears a black jacket and jeans. You also know he’s evil because he enjoys killing people more than... well... more than not killing people and also, he tries to kill Bronson, who is supposed to be his partner in crime... his boss even. Delon plays the most ruthless of the characters in this movie and you absolutely buy him as a villain. A thinly drawn, clichéd villain to be sure... but one who will worry you as to what he will ultimately do to the characters you have come to care about.

Then there’s Andress. She’s got “a thing” going with Delon and her character matches him in some aspects. You learn fairly quickly not to trust her (bewitching a man with her topless breasts before reaching for his gun... hey, she’d have shot me no problem) and luckily Bronson’s character knows not to trust her too. This doesn’t stop her having some depth to her character when she speaks up on behalf of our heroes after they have rescued her from a Comanche death torture. Andress doesn’t have a lot to do in this one but she really brings the character to life when she gets the chance. True, like the majority of the performances in this one (perhaps excluding Mifune’s who’s vast experience invests his character with a certain gravitas), it’s a very comic-book, stylised and blatant characterisation... but it’s just right for this film and it fits right in.

The music to this film comes from someone who is, to me, a surprising source to get to score something which is trying very hard to be an American Western. Directed by Young who was actually born in China, as was Mifune (although he was always synonymous with Japanese film), with a prominent French actor and a famous Swiss actress (who had worked with both Young and Dawson before on the set of Dr. No)... its a film where you wonder if Charles Bronson was just cast in it to be the “token American”. But it’s a Western with a difference and so to find the score written in a mode which doesn’t really harken back to Western Americana in it’s construction, nor more obviously to the then more fashionable style that Morricone brought to the Italian Western, I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised that famous Lawrence Of Arabia composer Maurice Jarre was chosen for scoring duties. He seems to have approached this very appropriately in some ways, highlighting a theme which is very much something with an “oriental” flavour to underline (and, of course, underscore) the unusual element of Mifune as a samurai in the West. It’s less of a Western score and more of a score which illustrates the warmth which grows between the characters... as opposed to relying on the tools-in-trade of the Great American Western. It’s not an absolutely wonderful score, but it is pretty interesting and won’t bump you out of the picture too much.

I could go on and try to persuade you as to why Red Sun is a gentle Western with a difference but I don’t think I really need to do that. Nor do I have to give it a full on recommendation because the main reason for seeing it is right in front of your face.

Mifune! Bronson! Delon! Andress! Capucine!

How many more reasons do you need to see this movie?

The Mountain Of The Cannibal God

Ursula Undress

The Mountain Of The Cannibal God

aka Primitive Desires

aka La Montagna Del Dio Cannibale

aka Slave Of The Cannibal God

aka Prisoner Of The Cannibal God

US 1978

Directed by Sergio Martino

EC Entertainment Region 0

Warning: This may have some very light spoilers, depending on what spoilers you think there could possibly be from a film with such a “does what it says on the tin” title.

So where do I even start with the illustriously entitled movie known to many simply as... The Mountain Of The Cannibal God... or even, "that movie where that Bond girlie takes her clothes off?"

Well, for me, it has to start somewhere in the mid 1990s when my sleepy little town of Enfield got “cabled up” by an enthusiastic company and we all had access to about a gazillion cable channels for the first time ever (yeah, okay, it’s also about a half a gazillion less than most digital services these days but, hey, we only had five channels before then so what do you want from me?). This service lasted for four or five years until the cable company decided we were getting too good a deal and tried to hike the prices up. This had the effect of making a lot of people, myself included, ditch the cable service and thus, for the time being, return to a simpler way of life. I don’t know if the cable company survived but knowing the inhabitants of my town like I do... I’m guessing they didn’t have much take up.

Okay then, so there I was with my fresh cable channel and we had a weird channel called HVC which, once it came on at about 10pm every night, seemed to be intent on showing the people of Enfield soft core porn movies... or, to be more precise, what were once hard core porn movies which had been rendered less hard and... erm... more soft by the use of various edits and optical zooms enforced on the poor customers of this particular cable company by whatever self appointed moral guardians felt it was right and proper to do so this time. But don’t get me started on the evils of censorship...

Now then, I’m sure you all know that I wouldn’t want to watch any of those nasty porn films (butter not melting in my mouth anytime soon) but, you know, I was interested in film so felt it best I watch some anyway, just to check on the levels of artistic and educational content that such films had to offer... and one of the things this channel used to show was a watered down broadcast of... um... a “porn programme” (?) called Electric Blue. With me so far? Good...

Now one of the episodes of this Electric Blue was a “celebrity special” showing clips from various porn films or steamy scenes from movie featuring as near as they could get to bona fide celebrities who had been in such things. You know the drill. It can be a bit of a stretch tenuously filling up this kind of compilation programme I’m guessing. So they had Sylvester Stallone on there, of course, in his “early” Italian Stallion phase. And the likes of La Cicciolina, Madonna, Koo Stark, Charlie Sheens ex-girlfriend (I’m sorry but the name escapes me), Helen Mirren (in a clip from Caligula) and... former two time Bond girl Ursula Andress in a clip from a movie where she is tied up naked to a pole and has red paint rubbed suggestively all over her body by two equally naked native gals. Now, at the time, I’d not seen any of the movies that these dubious gems were taken from but, after now having seen The Mountain Of The Cannibal God... I can say I have finally seen the movie where the Ursula Andress clip was taken from. Classy.

There were three reasons, really, why I wanted to get around to watching this movie at this time. Number one on that list is, naturally, the appreciation of the curvy nakedness of the film’s female lead... but I also wanted to see this one because it’s directed by the director Sergio Martino, who has made, in my opinion anyway, some of the greatest movies in the Italian giallo genre there are (some of which give Dario Argento a good run for his money). Thirdly, I have to admit, was the tempting allure of the discount boxes at the Camden Film Fair where I was able to purchase an uncut edition of The Mountain Of The Cannibal God for the less than princely sum of... £2 or three for a fiver. I like a good bargain.

So there I was, getting ready for the second half of a double bill on a late Friday night (I’d just watched Umberto Lenzi’s giallo Eyeball), armed with a big bag of popcorn and a can of shandy... I doused the lights, hit play and... the film commenced.

Okay... so The Mountain Of The Cannibal God is not a great film. Sergio Martino’s directing is pretty competent and he certainly tries hard with this tale of a brother and sister penetrating the jungle to gain access to a forbidden island in a search for the sister’s lost husband who is missing, presumed dead. He even tries to add depth to a lot of the shots by shooting through trees and using angles made by branches (many of which I’m sure have been strategically placed for just such a purpose rather than having been found growing naturally) to make the compositions more interesting. He also has a nice thing he does in a few early scenes where a person who is standing in medium to long shot and addressing a couple of people also in shot who are, say, siting down, walks across the set in time with a tracking shot swivelling around the composition... but it has to be said that, for all the artistic effort put into this movie... it’s more than just a little boring.

There are hangovers from the mondo and cannibal movies which were popular enough to obviously have necessitated Martino’s involvement with this kind of shock sensationalist entertainment (none of which I’ve seen as it happens). So you have various scenes of pseudo people eating scenes juxtaposed with actual footage of animals killing each other and so on but, even with this shock material inserted (and it’s way less than shocking compared to what I expect is to be found in the other films of this nasty little sub-genre), it has to be said that this film really does start to drag.

Andress is not particularly convincing in this one and the director seems to take every opportunity he can to get her wet... be it walking through heavy rain or falling into white water... but that all seems a bit of a waste when his camera quite astonishingly fails to linger on any of Ursula’s wet bits... refraining from all such instances of cheap sexual exploitation until we get to that later sequence which was lifted for the Electric Blue video programmes years later. Seems a bit pointless to have gone to all that trouble of getting her wet in the first place if you’re not going to linger on the effects of said wetness on the clothed female form. But enough of that...

The film is of interest, probably, only to those who find the Italian Cannibal genre something worth exploring or to those, like myself, who admire the movies of Sergio Martino... and, of course, for those of us who are intrigued by Ursula Andress’ on-screen presence. And even then, I had to sit through an extended and painfully paced piece of footage of a snake eating a live monkey and, also, a scene where... there’s no way to put this delicately methinks... a guy happily shags a pig... or possibly a wild boar come to think of it... yes, he bores a boar. And I had to sit through Stacy Keech’s performance too... that’s no easy thing.

Frankly, this movie wasn’t that hard to watch but wouldn’t exactly fit the term “pulse pounding” either. There really are a fair few more worthwhile movies I could have been watching rather than putting up with this and I was also disappointed that Ms. Andress didn’t “go all Conan” and deliver muscle-bound, nipple-poking, she-wolf justice as she appears to have been doing on the DVD cover art. Now that’s the film I wanted to see!